


Blood and Loyalty

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Naruto
Genre: Blood and Gore, But they don't spend a huge word count as enemies really, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Torture, Violence, sort of enemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29885703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: How dare they speak to him of loyalty? How dare they look down on him, when they had not been on the battlefield? Were they so young and wet behind the ears that they had never had to fight viciously, with survival the only prize and nothing but bloodshed defining your relationship to others, be it the blood drawn as enemies fought, the blood spilt to defend an ally, or the blood of families and kinship ties that had brought about the battle in the first place?These sparkling new Hidden Villages didn’t change what it meant to be a shinobi. They couldn’t. Soon, even these pathetic weevils would learn. To shinobi, there was only blood until the day you finally bled out. They could try and walk away from it, try and deny it, try and act like loyalty suddenly had a new meaning. But that didn’t change the truth- for shinobi, loyalty was blood was loyalty.Kakuzu's relationship with Hidan changes as his understanding of Hidan's understanding of loyalty changes.
Relationships: Hidan/Kakuzu (Naruto)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	Blood and Loyalty

**Author's Note:**

> For Trope Madness, prompts Dark Fic and Enemies to Lovers.

Hidan’s face loomed out of the darkness of the underground chamber like a spector. His pale face glowed in the light of the Nibi’s blue flames. Blood poured from a wound in his shoulder where the giant cat’s claws had nicked him, but it only seemed to make him wilder. 

Kakuzu crouched on his broken stalagmite, surveying the rest of the enormous chamber the Jinchuuriki had lured them into. With the entrances caved in and no windows to let in any light but the light of the Nibi’s chakra, it was difficult to tell how deep into the building they had chased her. Her escape path had tended downwards rather than upwards, so they were likely underground by this point, but other than that it was impossible to determine where they were relative to the open air. 

The Nibi lunged at Hidan, who only barely managed to leap out of the way. His scythe flew through the air, but one of the demon’s tails knocked it off course. Hidan screamed a curse as the altered trajectory of the heavy weapon pulled him out of position to make his landing. A wet-sounding crack echoed through the chamber. He must have broken something. 

As if something as small as a broken bone could take Hidan down. 

Sure enough, his partner was upright again before the demon cat fully turned around to pounce. Chakra claws shrieked against the scythe’s metal blades. 

The scent of blood grew stronger in the stale, dusty air.

Kakuzu’s muscles tightened in long-ingrained response. Hidan might be his partner only because he had not yet determined how to dispose of him, but partner he was, and there was only one correct response a shinobi could have to their partners’ bloodshed. 

_ Redouble the fight. _

* * *

_ When Kakuzu first met Hidan, he wondered if his general enmity towards the entirety of the modern institution of state-sponsored Shinobi had been distilled into a single individual. Hidan alternated between whining incessantly about normal aspects of life as a missing-nin and yelling about his loyalty to his god. He was a missing-nin without a village to miss him; he’d turned on every single comrade in arms in his village and slaughtered them for  _ Jashin.

_ Kakuzu understood the importance of loyalty to your partners, even as a missing-nin. He felt it deep in his bones, where the best shinobi kept all their deepest knowledge. But damn if the thought of offering his loyalty to someone like  _ Hidan _ didn’t make him want to retch.  _

_ It didn’t really matter. Hidan may be immortal, but he also had so many screws loose it was a minor miracle that anything he said made any sense. Even if Kakuzu didn’t find a way to kill him, he’d find some way to drop out of the Akatsuki. Probably just up and disappear one day, leaving Kakuzu alone for the precious few days or weeks it would take Leader-sama to find and recruit a replacement.  _

_ The first time Kakuzu saw one of Hidan’s rituals, a faint glimmer of respect gleamed through the general miasma of disgust. It was a pointless waste of time, yes. But it did put his devotion to his god in a more respectable light, from Kakuzu’s point of view. He offered blood to his god. Blood and shared suffering. Not just prayers or paper offerings with wishes written on them, but blood.  _

_ Kakuzu could respect blood as currency. He always kept real currency on his person, of course, since sometimes it felt like he was the only one who still understood blood as something transactional. It bound people, it was offered up as a gift of support, it was necessary to live and the goal of most high-paying missions.  _

_ Since that day, his respect had only grown as Hidan repeatedly demonstrated how well he understood the oldest of shinobi paradigms.  _

_ Slowly, Hidan transitioned from ideological enemy to true partner.  _

* * *

When he regained consciousness, the first thing he noticed was that he was bound tightly with a combination of adhesive bandages and chains. He tried to call up a tendril of chakra to help burn away the bandages, but that just caused the chains to glow as seals carved lightly into the metal lit up. 

He instantly stopped. The glow softened, then dimmed away completely. 

Hopefully none of those seals were alarms. If he’d been captured and chakra suppressed, then there was no point in drawing attention to himself until he had a plan.

At the thought of  _ drawing attention _ he realized it had been a while thirty seconds since he’d heard his partner complain. Hidan’s all-time record was ten minutes of silence while conscious, and those ten minutes had been several hours into a three-day trek through the mind-numbingly boring Earth Country desert. If Hidan was here, and he realized Kakuzu was awake, he would have started blathering on about something useless by now. 

He focused, but couldn’t seem to sense Hidan’s chakra anywhere nearby. 

Under his mask, his teeth gnashed together. 

So either Hidan had been captured and their captors were discovering that they really couldn’t kill him, just as Kakuzu himself had during those first few weeks after being assigned Hidan as a replacement partner, or he had escaped and left Kakuzu behind. 

Under his bruise-sore skin, his threads rippled and stretched, but with the adhesive bandages covering every seam in his piecemeal skin, there was no way for them to escape. At least, not just yet.

It was dark, but he thought he was in some sort of cell. The floor and walls were perfectly flat against his back, and when what few patches of skin he had left that weren’t covered in chains or bandages came in contact with them, they felt metallic. Even if he managed to get himself free of his bonds, he likely wouldn’t be able to escape from this cell using Earth Style. Kumo had a fair population of Earth Style users, and was not that distant from Iwa, whose jounin could famously sink right through solid stone and emerge on the other side, so they likely constructed this cell with that in mind. 

_ But,  _ he thought with a grim satisfaction, _ depending on what kind of metal it is, a little fire might heat it enough to bend- _

To his left, a door creaked lightly open. 

* * *

_ When he first returned to Takigakure after failing to kill Hashirama, still wrapped in the ripped tatters of his clothes to keep the blood still oozing from his wounds from dripping to the ground and leaving a trail and mask still over his face so he could bite the fabric to keep from making a sound as he runs on heavily bruised legs, he didn’t realize they weren’t taking him to the hospital. All the important buildings were in the center of the village, after all.  _

_ It wasn’t until the jounin who’d met him at the gate walked him right past the wide hospital doors, into the main administration building, past the mission report station and main filing desk to the back stairwell that he figured it out. But even then, as he followed his fellow Takigakure shinobi down the winding stairs towards the damp, dark, pit-like basement where “internal prisoners” were kept, he didn’t believe it. Not really.  _

_ The true moment of realization came when he laid eyes on the needle and ink.  _

_ He stopped dead.  _

_ At once a trio of threatening auras began to leak killing intent into the stale air. The jounin who’d led him down grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him forwards. His stone-hard nails dug roughly into the bruises that lined his forearms where he’d blocked Hashirama’s attacks.  _

_ Kakuzu remembered those nails. They were the result of a kekkei genkai that the village had managed to grab before Iwagakure did, back when Hidden Villages were popping up left and right to match the might of the mega-alliance the Senju and Uchiha had pulled off in the Land of Fire. He remembered those nails scrambling on his skin as he pulled their owner out of a Kumo prison cell. He remembered the odd angle of them, since the torturer he’d just slain had ripped them loose from their owners fingers one by one, but hadn’t yet pulled them all the way off.  _

_ Those nails pushed him down into an uncomfortable chair and slammed his arm down on the barrel top. _

_ First, they shaved his arms.  _

_ While the other two restrained him, Churuka carefully cleaned a razor. The blade gleamed dully as she washed it in the bucket of water sitting on the table, just out of his reach.  _

_ His muscles jumped when the cold metal touched his skin. The threads that normally lay in nice bundles like chords of muscle bunched up and bucked wildly, making the flesh of his forearm bulge and writhe like a thick burlap sack full of angry snakes. The jounin holding him down immediately tightened their grips on him. _

_ The kunoichi tattooist didn’t flinch. She just held the blade against his skin until it went still enough for her to make a long, easy swipe.  _

_ The next swipe was equally clean, if perhaps not quite parallel to the first. So was the third. On the fourth, he waited until she had started the stroke, then made his skin buck and shake like there was an earthquake deep in his bone marrow. She lost contact with his skin for a second, only to find it again with too much force. The razor embedded itself shallowly in his skin, at an angle such that it didn’t reach very far past the skin. Drops of blood pooled around the blade.  _

_ Kakuzu had become a shinobi long before Takigakure was built behind the great cascading falls of the Hakaba River. He might play at being a more civilized sort of mercenary now, but the scent of blood triggered something in him that went deeper than any late-adopted civility could ever reach. Based on the way the other three shinobi tensed and went battle-ready before an entire heartbeat had passed, he knew it had a similar effect on them.  _

This _ was what a shinobi was. Blood and loyalty and danger all wrapped around each other until they seemed like a person instead of a force of nature waiting to be released.  _

_ Churuka took a deep breath, visibly rejecting the instincts that rose in them all at the sight of blood, and leveled Kakuzu with a disappointed glare.  _

_ “Come now, Shinobi-san. Your behavior is unbecoming.” _

_ “Better that than submit meekly while some weakling but criminal bands on my arms when I have committed no crime,” he snarled at her.  _

_ “Committed no crime?” Huffed one of the shinobi holding his arm pinned to the table. “You accepted a mission from the Council of this Village, which is still so small and new, even compared to the other Hidden Villages, and swore that you would complete it! But you _ didn’t,  _ did you? You came slinking back here looking like a wreck, _ without  _ Hashirama’s head. You, who were supposed to be the strongest of us all!” _

_ His words hit Kakuzu like stones. His threads momentarily ceased writhing. The stillness of revelation settled heavy as thick-fallen snow on his limbs. The blood from the razor cut had become just a slow ooze. It was half-dried to scab, but the next thrust of Churuka’s razor across his arm ripped the wound open again. A fresh trickle of blood dripped down his roughly-shaven skin.  _

_ His crime was _ coming back alive?

_ “When you took that mission, you made a promise to the Village,” hissed the other shinobi holding down his arm. “You promised that you would accept the mission out of loyalty to the village, that you would fight with everything you had and return victorious. How can a Hidden Village stand if its members aren’t loyal enough, Kakuzu? How can we ensure that what we’ve built here lasts if people like you think you can fail?” _

Swipe.

_ “Now we will be targeted, since surely the  _ God of Shinobi _ will be able to find out where the assassin he beat came from, if he doesn’t know already. You’ve led him right to us!” _

Swipe.

_ “We thought we could trust you with this, Kakuzu. Those who knew you from the battlefields and territory wars before the building of the Hidden Villages thought you were strong and loyal. They thought you were the sort of shinobi who did whatever it took to win.” _

Swipe.

_ His bare skin prickled in the cold, damp air.  _

_ Churuka held up a bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured some onto his arms. Then, she put the bottle aside and hefted a tattoo needle and ink.  _

_ “So everyone knows of your failure,” she said, looking him in the eye. “We have been ordered to mark you. These rings around your arms will remind your  _ comrades _ that you are not the type to give your all. You are the sort of shinobi whose loyalty to the Village isn’t as strong as it should be.” _

* * *

_ The tattoos burned and stung as she stabbed them into his flesh.  _

_ The scent of blood did not leave the small, dim room. If anything, it grew heavier and heavier as Churuka worked, until it was heavy enough to break through his shock and release the fury that their words had ignited in him.  _

He _ was the disloyal one?  _ He _ was in the wrong, when he alone had been dedicated and daring enough to even accept the mission? _

_ Behind his eyelids he saw Hashirama’s powerful blows breaking his bones all over again, and the untreated wounds littered across his body began to sting. _

_ Hashirama could have ripped Churuka in two with his bare hands. He would not even have had to fight the two pathetic shinobi holding his arms down to accept the tattoos- he would simply have kicked them aside, and they would have been left clutching their ribs and hoping the bones hadn’t cracked into dangerous points that could stab their lungs and drown them before a medic could arrive.  _

_ How dare they speak to him of loyalty? How dare they look down on him, when they had not been on the battlefield? Were they so young and wet behind the ears that they had never had to fight viciously, with survival the only prize and nothing but bloodshed defining your relationship to others, be it the blood drawn as enemies fought, the blood spilt to defend an ally, or the blood of families and kinship ties that had brought about the battle in the first place? _

_ These sparkling new Hidden Villages didn’t change what it meant to be a shinobi. They couldn’t. Soon, even these pathetic weevils would learn. To shinobi, there was only blood until the day you finally bled out. They could try and walk away from it, try and deny it, try and act like  _ loyalty _ suddenly had a new meaning. But that didn’t change the truth- for shinobi, loyalty was blood was loyalty.  _

_ And they were casting him out even as he bled.  _

* * *

The creak of the door sent a jolt through his body. Instantly, Kakuzu felt his mind hardinging into something sharp and bloodthirsty. All thoughts of testing his bonds and sounding out his surroundings disappeared from his mind, leaving only anticipation and over eighty years of accumulated muscle memory and instinct. 

Weak light shone through the doorway, revealing a dark-skinned shinobi with close-cropped white hair and defensiveness etched into every line of his face. 

The man- boy, really, he was so unmarred by scars or scowl lines or any other marks that life as a shinobi inevitably left- held his weapon securely and walked with the measured, balanced gait of a well-trained shinobi. But the way his eyes darted around the cell like startled minnows in a pond and the minute movements of his fingers around the grip of his kunai betrayed his disquiet. 

Kakuzu cast his mind back, but he didn’t think he’d ever run into this kid before. So it wasn’t because he knew Kakuzu personally. 

“Prisoner,” the boy started, and though he hid it well Kakuzu could hear the tiny tremble in his voice, like the throat feathers of a tiny warbling bird. “I will be conducting your preliminary interrogation. If you cooperate, you will be allowed to stay in this cell, rather than being moved to a more specialized room.”

_ Specialized room.  _ What a sanitary way to say ‘torture chamber.’

“Why did you attack Yugito Nii?”

Kakuzu glared at the kid. The kid’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. 

Was he technically allowed to disclose the Akatsuki’s main mission? He wasn’t sure Leader-sama had ever made any judgement on that point. They had stuck to the shadows for several years while they prepared, of course, but they were speeding things up now. Making moves on Jinchuuriki in broad daylight. Just recently he’d heard that Deidara had fought the Kazekage himself in an aerial duel over the Hidden Village. 

The silence stretched longer and longer. The kid began to sweat. 

“What do you want with our Jinchuuriki?”

Kakuzu grinned. His lips parted all the way up to his ears, until the stitching along his cheeks struggled to contain the grin and force it into the proper shape. 

“I want to drag her back to my Leader and rip that demon out of her body, then find a profitable place to dispose of her corpse.”

The kid went stiff as a board. 

Kakuzu could see the way the angry words bubbled up in the kid’s throat, and the way he choked them back down. 

“Why did you want to remove the demon?”

His voice shook as he asked. Kakuzu genuinely wasn’t sure whether it’s from fear or fury.

His cheek stitches stretched to contain his smile. If he still had blood, some of it might have started to drip from where they were forced to cut into the skin.

“What’s it to you? I thought the Hidden Villages hated and feared their Jinchuuriki.”

“Kumo is different!” The kid exploded. “And Yugito-sensei wasn’t some dangerous, unwieldy weapon who took out as many comrades as enemies. She was disciplined, and strong, and fearless, and she believed in the Village! But you don’t care about any of that, do you? You and that disappearing partner of yours went right for her the second you got here. You couldn’t have been after anything but the demon inside her. So why do you need the Two-Tails?”

Kakuzu chuckled at the passionate outburst. 

“Because my Leader requires it.”

The kid was trembling now. Perhaps this was the moment when they would finally get to the torture and experimentation and vengeance. 

Or perhaps he would just grit his teeth and ask another useless question.

It was funny now, with his time in Takigakure decades behind him, what a production these clueless young shinobi put on when he tried to kill their mentor or friend. They all acted like they understood the value of blood spilled together for a common cause, and they all loudly proclaimed their loyalty both to their Village and to whatever unlucky bounty Kakuzu was about to collect. 

Then they would drag themselves back to their village if Kakuzu didn’t kill them, and Kakuzu would live to see them betray each other and ostracize each other over missteps big or small and kill each other to set up wars or to keep information silent. With his immortality, he had seen so many of them prove that blood and loyalty didn’t mean as much as they claimed it did. 

If that Jinchuuriki meant so much to the kid, he should start working on destroying Kakuzu’s hearts now. If Kakuzu had someone who truly felt that way about  _ him _ , he’d be best served trying to figure out when and how they would come for him, so he could make his rescue as painless as possible. 

But loyalty like that didn’t exist between shinobi anymore, so the kid and him were both stuck here, pretending like they were invested in this stupid interrogation. 

The kid prattled on, and Kakuzu began betting with himself on how long it would take them to figure out they had to go for his hearts. 

And that was when Hidan’s face loomed out of the darkness beyond the doorway. 

The sight of his partner sent all five of his hearts skipping a beat from shock.

He grinned at Kakuzu over the Kumo nin’s shoulder. The whites of his eyes were wide and bright in the darkness. They had the same look they had when he was about to initiate one of his rituals.

Then he lifted one of Kakuzu’s masks and slid it smoothly over his face and slipped back into the shadows. The kid probably hadn’t even noticed he was there. 

“What other Jinchuuriki do you plan to target?” He demanded. Kakuzu just schooled his face and stared at him. If he pushed his senses, he thought he could hear the clang of metal on metal somewhere far away. 

He had no idea why his partner was here, in the depths of whatever prison building the Raikage’s interrogators had stuck him in, but that was no reason to draw attention to him. Hidan could do that just fine by himself when he was good and ready. 

“The Raikage himself is interested in your case, you know, so don’t think you can just play mute all day. You can either spill to me, or you can spill to him, but one way or another we  _ will _ learn what you wanted with Yugito-sensei.”

The smell of blood drifted through the door and tickled Kakuzu’s nose. Still the kid didn’t seem to notice. 

Perhaps the Nibi was somewhere in the building, and Hidan was making another try at grabbing her?

“If this sensei of yours matters to you so much, why don’t you carve the answers out of me yourself?” Kakuzu smirked. 

The kid’s hand clenched on his sword, but he didn’t draw it. 

Pathetic. 

“So that’s all that loyalty of yours amounts to,” he taunted. “You talk a big game, but you won’t even spill a little blood for her.”

The kid crinkled up his nose in indignation.

“Raikage-sama said-”

Whatever the Raikage had said was cut off as Hidan burst through the door in a whirlwind of flashing steel and familiar masks. 

The kid disappeared in a puff of smoke as soon as Hidan’s scythe connected with his side. Kakuzu’s opinion of the kid fell still further- had he not had the courage to be in the same room as a legendary shinobi for real, or did his superiors not trust him enough to let his real body into the cell? 

Hidan looked even more pissed about the missed kill, but he got over it quickly. His silver hair was covered in bloody fingerprints, so he must have gotten his fill of killing already. 

Kakuzu stared as his partner sliced through the adhesive where it covered his stitches, allowing them to emerge at last. Now that his imminent demise by fumbling genin and/or the Raikage’s torturers had been staved off, his initial shock at seeing his partner again came filtering back. 

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m breaking you out, jackass! We still need to grab that fucking Jinchuuriki, and I don’t remember any of your stupid plans. Now hurry it up with your creepy thread-things, I didn’t find the key to those chains.”

With his threads no longer constrained, getting out of his bondage presented no challenge. 

As soon as he was standing again, Hidan pressed himself all over Kakuzu’s bare chest and listened for each heartbeat. 

“Those fuckers didn’t even get rid of  _ one _ of those things?” He whined when he successfully located all five slightly-asynchronous rhythms. “What is this, amateur hour?”

He spit on a corpse as they exited the room. It’s glassy eyes stared up in blank, dead horror as its murderer made an awkward little jump to avoid the growing puddle of blood and filth leaking from it’s torso. 

“And I was hoping I could sweep you off your feet by offering to let you rip mine out of my chest as a replacement.”

“I don’t want your heart.”

“Rude! And here I thought all those nights spent together meant something to you too.”

“Part of the point of maintaining all five is to have easy, natural access to all five chakra natures. Do you even have a chakra nature?”

“Of course I do, you heathen, I just don’t need to use it! Jashin-sama’s gifts are all I need.”

"Where is the Nibi?"

"Down the hall. I know she needs to be alive when that creep Zetsu gets here, so I haven't made a proper sacrifice of her, but she's not going anywhere."

Kakuzu grunted. 

"It's irresponsible to leave the target unguarded."

"Hey, I did it so save your crusty ass!" Hidan shrieked. "And here I was expecting some gratitude."

Their bickering continued as they walked down the winding halls and picking their way around dead shinobi. As he listened to the sound of Hidan's whining, the rhythm of Kakuzu's hearts settled into something calm and relaxed. 


End file.
